Momentum by Gary Smith

Teacher

Chairman

About Course

Ciena is diversifying our customer base and gaining share in new markets. That was the message from Ciena CEO Gary Smith earlier today during a conference call to detail Ciena’s Q4 and fiscal year 2015 financial results. You can find ourfinancial results press release here and you can listen to an archive of the conference call here.

Specifically, Gary highlighted Ciena’s success in the data center interconnect (DCI) market with new web-scale internet content providers (ICPs), and our early traction with Blue Planet since the acquisition of Cyan earlier this year.

“We have significantly diversified our customer base so that non-telco now represents about a third of total revenues versus less than a quarter of our business five years ago. This includes a strong leadership position with web-scale players,” said Gary during the call.

“And I’m happy to announce that our momentum continues as we’ve added another Top 5 web-scale customer in Q4, meaning Ciena now directly serves four of the five largest web-scale companies in the world – and we are gaining share within those accounts.”

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Ciena CFO Jim Moylan later commented that 5-10% of Ciena revenue now comes from web-scale customers, and that our top 100G customer in Q4 was a leading web-scale player.

That momentum in the DCI market with the web-scale community is due in part to our new Waveserver platform unveiled earlier this year and now generally available. Gary stated that Ciena already has four customers for the new platform, which is also currently in 16 customer trials.

On the Blue Planet side, Gary called 2016 a “foundational year” for our new network orchestration and virtualization platform. With SDN and NFV deployments top of mind for many of our customers, Gary highlighted the benefit of having a trusted partner relationship for them to lean on.

“As we expected, Ciena’s trusted relationships with forward-thinking customers are opening new doors for Blue Planet – with the pipeline more than doubling since the Cyan acquisition,” said Gary during the conference call.

“We added two new Blue Planet customers in Q4, both of which are Tier 1s – one in North America and one international – bringing our total number of Blue Planet customers to eight. In addition, we are engaged and short-listed on additional Tier 1 service provider opportunities with testing well underway, and we are successfully expanding engagements with existing Blue Planet customers.”